Pre-show emailing campaign – how to do it right?

If you exhibit at a trade show, you must already know that the secret to your future success lies in your ability to meet with the right prospects to get additional business.

You could go to your trade show booth and blindly trust that the show organizer will bring the right crowd to the event and that your marketing team’s talent will drive this crowd directly inside your booth.

Or, you could actually push your luck and build this crowd yourself. Let’s review together the right approach to pre-show emailing campaigns.

everything you need to know, in a 1-minute video

1. Prepare your mailing lists

Who should you inform via email?

Don’t get all the poor-quality, scrawled, purchased, collected from previous jobs email lists. Those will bring you nothing but troubles.

Build a high-quality list that contains:

your current customers

your prospects

your serious leads

past show visitors

eventually your partners, suppliers, investors if it makes sense for them to join

That’s it.

Now there are two methods – if your business is very generic and you somehow treat everyone the same way, you may put all these contacts in the same bucket. Most certainly, however, since these people belong to different groups and are at different stages of their purchase cycle, you may want to separate them in different buckets to receive different emails at different times.

2. Build your content

“Please come visit our booth ABC at XYZ show next month!”

Are you thrilled? Are you already buying your plane tickets to visit that booth? I guess not.

Your emails must be exciting! Think about it: why would people want to visit your booth?

Make a list of all the reasons:

product launch

innovations

discounts

exclusive deals

contest

game

etc.

Figure out why people should come pay you a visit and organize these reasons from the least important one to the most exciting one!

Now that your content is ready, write a few emails (3 usually does the trick) that you will send a few weeks apart to inform your contact list. Keep the most exciting reasons for the last email and build the suspense to keep people eager to read your next mail and visit your booth!

3. Find your CTA

Emails are great but quickly become pointless if they contain no CTA (Call To Action). What do you want people to do after receiving your email? Get them to DO something, otherwise, they’ll just move on and forget about it.

In most cases, you will want them to set up an appointment with you – most people won’t, and if they do, they might just not respect the agreed timing anyway, but this is important because they commit to something therefore already accepted to join the show for you.

Provide them with additional material – a pdf or, even better, a webpage explaining why they should come visit with examples and details. You MUST keep your email short and crispy, just keep the big headlines and news, all the rest should go in links and attachments.

myfairtool provides you with an easy way to create a company page to promote your booth and products and schedule appointments easily.

4. Schedule your campaign

You need a calendar to send your emails easily. If you use software such as MailChimp or SendInBlue, it will be easy to manage, otherwise, just set reminders in your own calendar.

You don’t want to spam people – three emails should be enough. Send the first one 3 months before the show, the second one a month before and the last one a couple of weeks ahead of time, to give people sufficient time to plan their trip if needed.

This timeline is different for each business and maybe your schedule should be managed differently – find your own strategy.

5. Sit back and relax

We had prepared for you the perfect lemonade recipe so you could relax, but then we realized you may need to do more than just send these emails!